TimerOS vs ActivTrak: hours that become invoices, and EU storage by default

No. Neither feature exists in the product, so there is no setting to switch off and nothing to review afterwards. To work out what the time was spent on, the Windows app reads the active window title, the application name and, in a browser, the site’s domain, all in memory. Only the label, how confident the classification is and the hours per day reach the server. If you correct a classification, that app and title are saved on your own machine, not ours. The timer itself sits in a bar the tracked person can see all day. There is no silent mode.

There is no free plan, and yes, the trial takes a card at signup. You get 14 days of the full plan, with nothing cut or locked. The card is saved through Stripe and nothing is charged during the trial; the workspace owner can cancel from the Subscription page in the dashboard before it ends. If you stay, Freelancer is €8 a month billed annually (€10 month to month, one seat) and Startup is €15 per user per month billed annually (€18 monthly, up to 50 seats).

Your client pays nothing. The €8 tier covers projects and tasks, invoicing and billing, basic expenses and a basic profit overview, support tickets and the full branded client portal at your own address. There your client sees their projects, approvals, tickets, invoices and chat, a whiteboard where they approve work, and incident war rooms. A client takes no seat and no licence. Team management, shifts, leave approvals and company goals start at Startup. Full expenses and a full P&L are on Enterprise, which is in early access and not self-serve.

Your client signs in at your own branded portal address, separate from our dashboard. There they see their projects, the approvals waiting on them, their tickets and invoices, a chat thread with you, a whiteboard where they sign off work, and an incident war room if something breaks. A client account takes no seat and no licence, so adding clients does not raise your bill. The portal is included from the €8 Freelancer tier up. Your own team works at app.timeros.ai, a different address; do not send clients there.

Up to a point. Hours attach to projects and tasks that carry budgets, and those hours become invoices in the same workspace. That lets you set the time a client’s work took against what you billed them. Freelancer and Startup include basic expenses and a basic profit overview. Full expenses with vendor bills and approvals, and a full P&L including payroll, are on Enterprise, which is in early access and not self-serve.

Not for tracking today; for everything else, yes. Automatic tracking runs in the Windows desktop app, and there is no Linux or mobile tracking. It starts when someone signs in to the computer and classifies activity on the device itself. Everything else runs in a browser: your team works at app.timeros.ai, which has everything except tracking, and your clients sign in at your own portal address. Mac users and clients install nothing. A mixed team can still share one workspace. You can assign work to a designer on a Mac, approve it and invoice it, but their hours will not track themselves yet. If tracked hours off Windows are the reason you are buying today, check each vendor’s own platform page, linked in the comparison above. The macOS build is in development roadmap.

Databases on MongoDB Atlas in Frankfurt and Ireland, application compute on Render in Frankfurt, and uploaded files in Cloudflare R2 created with the EU jurisdiction restriction. Your contract is with Vezoft, a Bulgarian company under EU law imprint, and the full sub-processor list, sixteen names, is published alongside our DPA our DPA. You can send your client those links rather than write an answer yourself. What we will not give you is a line saying nothing ever leaves the EU. The Cloudflare CDN edge that serves the pages is global, Stripe and Google involve US processing, and if you hire an AI employee, its model calls, image generation and web searches are processed in the US. All of them are on the same published list, so the accurate answer is scoped to databases, application compute and uploaded files. We also do not hold SOC 2.

Sometimes it is cheaper. The price rows in the table above are quoted from each vendor’s own pricing page, in the currency each one publishes, with the date we checked. We have not converted anything. Two things to check first: whether the plan has a seat minimum, which changes what one person actually pays, and which of the things you need are on that entry plan rather than a higher one. Client login, invoicing and support tickets sit in our €8 tier; if you buy those from someone else today, add what they cost before comparing per-seat prices. And if entry price is your main constraint, buy the cheaper plan. Better that than cancelling in month two.

Integrations: only the AI assistant connector (MCP) has shipped. Third-party integrations appear on the Enterprise tier list and are not built yet. SOC 2: we do not hold it, in any form. If procurement begins there, that is a real reason to choose something else. Screenshots and keystroke logging: neither feature exists in the product, so if you need visual evidence of work we cannot produce it. Tracking off Windows: not today; the macOS build is in development. Payroll, unlimited departments, a company-wide org chart, single sign-on and an audit log: all on Enterprise, which is in early access and not self-serve. A free plan: we have none, and the 14-day trial takes a card. The comparison rows above link each fact we could verify to the vendor’s own page, with the date we checked it. For anything they do not cover, read the vendor’s page rather than take our word for it.